1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing system and a processing method for use therewith wherein history information is collected from equipment items over a network for equipment item management and other purposes.
2. Description of the Related Art
There exist information processing systems that collect history information from equipment items in offices (buildings), factories and the like for room entry/exit management, energy management, and equipment item management. With these systems, the equipment items are usually managed within a local network. Where the Internet is used for such management purposes, dedicated servers and networks of particular customers have been generally used to constitute a dedicated system. In recent years, there have also been proposed SaaS (Software as a Service) services and cloud services in which a single system is utilized by numerous customers.
Where equipment items are managed via the Internet as mentioned above and where histories of controls and changes in status of the equipment items are collected, it is preferred that the same history not be collected again. For example, JP-2005-92576-A proposes a technique for preventing the same information from being acquired in duplicate as a result of inadvertent operations by a user, the technique being one of history management that involves comparing the downloadable data stored in a server with the history of orders placed by a client to determine whether or not to offer the data to that client.
JP-2006-339726-A proposes a technique for use when continuously transmitted data is relayed while some data is getting lost along the way. The technique involves searching for data items that match acknowledge numbers based on previous data history information, to find the most recent of the matching history information. The most recent matching history information is set as the data history information for correcting the acknowledge numbers of the data.